My home away from home

Teacher's Wizard

This application was my first commercial program. When Apple launched the Lisa in 1983, I was really impressed by the GUI and tried to replicate it on my home computer. I created an application that allowed to easily created CBT (Computer Based Training) courses that ran on my own windowing system, which I was very proud of. I sold limited rights to the product to a catholic editorial group in Spain called Edelvives that also operated a large group of schools that used Apple II computers to train their students.

I used the money to fly to the US to attend an Apple II event in San Francisco in order to find a company interested in my program. I was lucky, Britannica Software, a company owned by the publishers of the well known encyclopedia, decided to published it in the US. I was only 19 and I felt I owned the world.

This program was extremely ambitious. It included many modules that allowed teachers not only to create a full course with graphics and animations but also a glossary and multiple choice quizzes that could be automatically graded by the application. To create the training material I developed a graphical interface reminiscent of the Mac, a computer that had just been launched a year earlier and I developed many concepts that were quite similar to what Hypercard would implement a couple of years later. Because it used a GUI, Teacher's Wizard was one of the relatively few Apple II applications that supported using a mouse as an input device, although that was not necessary because a joystick could also be used as an alternative.

I localized the program in English, French and Spanish.

Britannica asked me to make several changes to the product before launching it in the U.S. By the time I completed them, the market had changed and Britannica was no longer interested in the original Apple II. They wanted products for the recently announced Apple IIgs. They published two of my games for that platform (Jigsaw! and LaserForce), but that is a different story. As for Teacher's Wizard, the project was canned and it was never published outside of Spain. That said, thirty years later I remain extremely proud of my work on this project. I faced so many challenges and I learned so much working on this project that I can't emphasize enough the importance this title had on my career as a software developer.

French Title Screen

I localized the program in English, French and Spanish.

Quizz

Teacher's Wizard could be used to create quizzes.

A screen of the sample training course about the human head

Teachers had to create the graphics for their courses. Few had the skills.

Courses could contain a glossary

A glossary was included to help the students learn new words and concepts.

Teacher's Wizard

I have fond memories of my first programming device, despite the fact that this calculator did not have persistent memory, which made programming long applications a real pain. Despite the problems, it was the device on which I wrote my first game, which I called Mine field.

In 1980 I had the opportunity to play with many different computer brands. However, at the time, none matched the graphics capabilities of the Apple II. One of my friends helped me buy an Orange II, a clone produced in Taiwan.